Configuration and scheduling of the LHCb trigger application

For Run 3 of the Large Hadron Collider, the final stage of the LHCb experiment’s high-level trigger must process 100 GB/s of input data. This corresponds to an input rate of 1 MHz, and is an order of magnitude larger compared to Run 2. The trigger is responsible for selecting all physics signals that form part of the experiment’s broad research programme, and as such defines thousands of analysis-specific selections that together comprise tens of thousands of algorithm instances. The configuration of such a system needs to be extremely flexible to be able to handle the large number of different studies it must accommodate. However, it must also be robust and easy to understand, allowing analysts to implement and understand their own selections without the possibility of error. A Python-based system for configuring the data and control flow of the Gaudi-based trigger application is presented. It is designed to be user-friendly by using functions for modularity and removing indirection layers employed previously in Run 2. Robustness is achieved by reducing global state and instead building the data flow graph in a functional manner, whilst keeping configurability of the full call stack.

A High-Throughput Architecture for the SHA-256/224 Compliant With the DSRC Standard

This article presents a word serial retimed architecture for the SHA-256/224 algorithm. The architecture is compliant with the dedicated-short range communication for safety message authentications. We elaborate three-operand adder architectures suitable for field programmable gate array implementation. Several transformation techniques at the data-flow-graph level have been used to derive the architecture. Synthesis results show that the architecture has high throughput/ slice value compared with state-of-the-art SHA-256 implementations. The article also promulgates a comparison between high-level synthesis and RTL design.

Multiple-Core PLC CPU Implementation and Programming

The paper presents a complete approach to the multithreaded execution of a control program prepared according to IEC61131-3 standard. The program is mapped to a dedicated multiple-core CPU unit. The CPU consists of multiple independent bit and word CPUs. The computation synchronization mechanism is based on memory cells with semaphored access, which enable hardware-level synchronization. The paper presents in detail the architecture, results of implementation and the achieved performance. The custom-developed compiler translates standard programming languages into a multithreaded executable form. It utilizes an original intermediate data flow graph to optimize and recognize program parallelisms. The program is automatically partitioned and mapped to the available computing resources. The paper is concluded with a performance comparison of program executions using the standard single-threaded and proposed approaches.

Fault Attacks Made Easy: Differential Fault Analysis Automation on Assembly Code

Over the past decades, fault injection attacks have been extensively studied due to their capability to efficiently break cryptographic implementations. Fault injection attack models are normally determined by analyzing the cipher structure and finding exploitable spots in non-linear and permutation layers. However, this level of abstraction is often too high to distinguish vulnerable parts of software implementations, due to specific operations and optimizations. On the other hand, manually analyzing the assembly code requires non-negligible amount of time and expertise. In this paper, we propose an automated approach for analyzing cipher implementations in assembly. We represent the whole assembly program as a data flow graph so that the vulnerable spots can be found efficiently. Fault propagation is analyzed in a subgraph constructed from each vulnerable spot, allowing equations for Differential Fault Analysis (DFA) to be automatically generated. We have created a tool that implements our approach: DATAC – DFA Automation Tool for Assembly Code. We have successfully used this tool for attacking PRESENT- 80, being able to find implementation-specific vulnerabilities that can be exploited in order to recover the last round key with 16 faults. Our results show that DATAC is useful in finding attack spots that are not visible from the cipher structure, but can be easily exploited when dealing with real-world implementations.